8 ms·

As another commenter pointed out, the title of this article is heavily editorialized. And I think that's the most interesting part of this link. There seems to

As another commenter pointed out, the title of this article is heavily editorialized. And I think that's the most interesting part of this link. There seems to be a growing appetite in this country to stoke the flames of class warfare. Perhaps it's because, despite the Great Recession and those two wars you never really hear anything about anymore, our generation truly does not have any great struggle to arm ourselves against. Poverty rates are dropping precipitously around the globe as is violent crime. We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury. Our life expectancy rates are ever increasing. I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause. As we continue to see American wealth "trickle down" to developing nations as labor is shifted overseas, it brings into starker contrast the wealth inequalities between us and our 1%, ignoring of course the irony that we Americans collectively are the one-percenters of the world.

msvalkon 11y ago
"I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause." Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Indeed. We're the ones to face the grandest causes - fixing the climate, killing the death itself, spreading human life to the rest of the Solar System. And only handful of geeks care. Most of the world seems to be busy with celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% or inventing new reasons to get outraged about something.
  - duncanawoods 11y ago
    >> celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% One is entertainment, the other ends in violent revolution. I suspect we can't fix the climate until we fix inequality because its the 1% that profits from climate destruction yet holds the power of regulation.
danghica 11y ago
You seem to assume that extreme inequality in society is to be fought against only if it leads to an overall degradation of material prosperity. That is nonsense. People always wanted more equality for the same reason they wanted democracy, no matter what the level of material prosperity in a country. People have a deep-seated need to be engaged and to have a say in the unfolding of their own destiny at the scale of society, to have meaningful lives. Indeed, the average person in the US, EU, Japan, Australia, etc. has food, clothes, transportation, health-care (perhaps not US), technology and so on that would make the kings of 100 years ago envious. But they also know that their influence on society through conventional democratic means has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, as the super-wealthy amassed the material and political means to control the decision-making process. And guess what? Many people hate that. Many people will not be bribed into political submission by knick-knacks, amusement and delicious snacks. There is deep resentment brewing.
- Radim 11y ago
  I like how you just reiterated GP's last "point of irony" there, in a roundabout way. Because that's how much of the rest of the world feels re. USA/"the west". One-percenters... complaining about their own one-percenters... And yes, there is deep resentment brewing indeed.
  - danghica 11y ago
    There is absolutely no irony. Extreme inequality is undesirable on any scale. This is consistency, the opposite of irony.
    - marknutter 11y ago
      We'll go with this definition of irony provided by the Google: "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result." Class warriors wanting to decrease inequality by getting the 1% to pay their fair share, not enter into global trade agreements, and keep jobs in America end up increasing inequality globally by focusing only on efforts to prop up the global 1%, the majority of whom live in the U.S. Sounds pretty ironic to me.
RobertoG 11y ago
"We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury." But it's not this fact what, precisely, make things worse?. I mean, we live in the most prosperous age. The productivity increase of the last decades has been nothing short of stunning. And anyway, we have to heard that "we" can't afford health care for everybody, that "we" should work longer years, that "we" have to cut the expenses of social protections because "we" have not "enough money". Ah, the irony..
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Yes. A glut of resources orbiting the pinnacles of society, and everyone else must cut back to make the numbers work for those elites, to their direct tangible detriment.
rtpg 11y ago
>We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury But we still have a significant portion of the population that has to work 2+ jobs to survive. America is the only developed nation in the world to my knowledge where this is expected, let alone imagined (hell, in France it's illegal to have two jobs). Americans (myself included) should be ashamed at how much of an abject failure we've been to so much of the population. Say what you will about Western Europe, but pretty much everyone will get 3 meals a day there.
- eronhp 11y ago
  France also has double digit unemployment rates.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Life expectancy rates are also falling for middle aged people.
  - lagadu 11y ago
    Yes but the EU standard (which only Spain doesn't follow IIRC) for measuring unemployment is a more inclusive than the US one.[1] edit: which isn't to say that France doesn't have higher (comparable) unemployment rates than the US, I believe it does but different government types have different tolerances and expectations for unemployment levels naturally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#Measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#Measurement
  - rtpg 11y ago
    double digits, but barely (10.8%). And there are some safety nets, like basic income, housing aids, and gracious help if you have children, that make underemployment slightly less awful. I bet a hell of a lot less people go hungry in France compared to the US.
    - refurb 11y ago
      Do you have any evidence to back that up or is it just a hunch? The US has a pretty solid safety net as well including unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, child and mother nutrition programs, Medicaid coverage, etc.
pron 11y ago
Which is why I think it is crucial that we all understand what it is that those party-poopers are actually saying, rather than respond to the whines we're hearing. The one core point of all of our liberal struggles -- whether "class warfare" as you call it or feminism -- isn't about being content, happy, alive etc.. It is about power[1] and its distribution. Absolute measures of wealth are very important, but so is the distribution of power. As long as the distribution of power is so grossly imbalanced, it means that few of us have a lot of control over the many, or, if you prefer, that the many aren't free[2]. If people learn only one thing about this class-warfare or feminism, it should be this. This unfair distribution of power is a problem at any scale: within the West, the West vs. the rest of the world etc.. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) [2]: The word free is a loaded one, and in the taxonomy of values it is an ill-defined one because it is self-contradictory, but I'm using it here very loosely.
VLM 11y ago
"We have an embarrassing wealth of food" Who's this "we"? 40% of school children have free/reduced lunch due to poverty.
- marknutter 11y ago
  Sorry, I should have given the proper context in my original post, but I mean we have an embarrassing wealth of food compared to past generations. Yes, it sucks that some children have less than others, but when compared to children from past generations they're doing much better.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  My mother will gladly relate to you how her family was never really poor growing up: the really poor kids came to school with Crisco sandwiches. There was no free or reduced-price school lunch.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  Right, but 100 years ago, those kids would just starve to death, rather than get state assistance.
  - flubert 11y ago
    Anyone have statistics for number of starvation deaths in 1915 in the U.S.?
cryoshon 11y ago
To call America a democracy today is not accurate; the public's actions have no sway on policy relative to the sway that the moneyed elites hold. This phenomenon has been documented by a number of studies. Capitalist oligarchy is the correct term to refer to the system of government of the US. The public is disgruntled about the perceived change from democracy to this new despotic system. Class warfare against the rich is now a concept because most of the country lost the last round of class warfare around the time the economic depression started, in which the rich got far richer while everyone else got poorer. Whether this is a great struggle for rights or not is unclear, but based off of the last Gilded Age, it will be glossed over in the history books such that people do not understand that change can be effected under certain circumstances. We have a bevy of great causes, but for the most part, our empowerment to affect changes in service of those causes has been nullified. We are disenfranchised, and disgruntled. That we live in relative comfort is no relief; we feel excluded from the making of our own society, and it is a serious problem. This exclusion needs to change first before the other issues can be pursued. The last time there was such a disenfranchisement of public power in the US, a world war caused it to fall out of attention.
elipsey 11y ago
I don't want more money; I want more democracy. Treating our highly skewed wealth distribution strictly as a matter of material welfare is a diversion from the fact that extreme income inequality is evidence of regulatory capture and rent seeking. When war contractors and bankers whisper in the ear of the executive branch to lobby for legislation by executive order and extra judicial legal clarifications (as in the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales fiasco), massive anonymous campaign donations are upheld by the supreme court as "free speech", and so on, the wealthy have many times more political influence than you do. Recall the scandals surrounding massive, secret, quid pro quo political donations by the tycoons of the first Gilded Age; now the supreme court has found that when the rich buy an election they have a legal right to do it in secret. The problem is not that I want more money; it's that our votes are counted in dollars. This is how we ended up with a regressive tax system (20-30 percent for earned income, %15 for capital gains, %0 percent for offshore “wealth managed” assets), “Torte Reform”, “Bankruptcy Reform”, and plea bargaining, to keep you from having your day in court, privatized prisons, repeal of Glass-Steagall, and all sorts of other rules that structurally advantage people who control capital. The state arguably sponsors consumer indebtedness: the education, health care, and housing markets are all inflated by government money, and medical and student debts are exempt from bankruptcy. Low interest rates seem to create asset bubbles, and we socialize the losses by bailing out banks but not individuals. A good life means more than just “three meals a day” eaten in prison, on parole, or as an indentured servant. “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Anatole France

msvalkon 11y ago

"I think we Millenials are, more than any generation before us, desperately in search of our great cause." Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Indeed. We're the ones to face the grandest causes - fixing the climate, killing the death itself, spreading human life to the rest of the Solar System. And only handful of geeks care. Most of the world seems to be busy with celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% or inventing new reasons to get outraged about something.
- duncanawoods 11y ago
  >> celebrity gossip or complaining about 1% One is entertainment, the other ends in violent revolution. I suspect we can't fix the climate until we fix inequality because its the 1% that profits from climate destruction yet holds the power of regulation.

danghica 11y ago

You seem to assume that extreme inequality in society is to be fought against only if it leads to an overall degradation of material prosperity. That is nonsense. People always wanted more equality for the same reason they wanted democracy, no matter what the level of material prosperity in a country. People have a deep-seated need to be engaged and to have a say in the unfolding of their own destiny at the scale of society, to have meaningful lives. Indeed, the average person in the US, EU, Japan, Australia, etc. has food, clothes, transportation, health-care (perhaps not US), technology and so on that would make the kings of 100 years ago envious. But they also know that their influence on society through conventional democratic means has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, as the super-wealthy amassed the material and political means to control the decision-making process. And guess what? Many people hate that. Many people will not be bribed into political submission by knick-knacks, amusement and delicious snacks. There is deep resentment brewing.

Radim 11y ago
I like how you just reiterated GP's last "point of irony" there, in a roundabout way. Because that's how much of the rest of the world feels re. USA/"the west". One-percenters... complaining about their own one-percenters... And yes, there is deep resentment brewing indeed.
- danghica 11y ago
  There is absolutely no irony. Extreme inequality is undesirable on any scale. This is consistency, the opposite of irony.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    We'll go with this definition of irony provided by the Google: "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result." Class warriors wanting to decrease inequality by getting the 1% to pay their fair share, not enter into global trade agreements, and keep jobs in America end up increasing inequality globally by focusing only on efforts to prop up the global 1%, the majority of whom live in the U.S. Sounds pretty ironic to me.

RobertoG 11y ago

"We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury." But it's not this fact what, precisely, make things worse?. I mean, we live in the most prosperous age. The productivity increase of the last decades has been nothing short of stunning. And anyway, we have to heard that "we" can't afford health care for everybody, that "we" should work longer years, that "we" have to cut the expenses of social protections because "we" have not "enough money". Ah, the irony..

cryoshon 11y ago
Yes. A glut of resources orbiting the pinnacles of society, and everyone else must cut back to make the numbers work for those elites, to their direct tangible detriment.

rtpg 11y ago

>We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury But we still have a significant portion of the population that has to work 2+ jobs to survive. America is the only developed nation in the world to my knowledge where this is expected, let alone imagined (hell, in France it's illegal to have two jobs). Americans (myself included) should be ashamed at how much of an abject failure we've been to so much of the population. Say what you will about Western Europe, but pretty much everyone will get 3 meals a day there.

eronhp 11y ago
France also has double digit unemployment rates.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Life expectancy rates are also falling for middle aged people.
- lagadu 11y ago
  Yes but the EU standard (which only Spain doesn't follow IIRC) for measuring unemployment is a more inclusive than the US one.[1] edit: which isn't to say that France doesn't have higher (comparable) unemployment rates than the US, I believe it does but different government types have different tolerances and expectations for unemployment levels naturally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#Measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#Measurement
- rtpg 11y ago
  double digits, but barely (10.8%). And there are some safety nets, like basic income, housing aids, and gracious help if you have children, that make underemployment slightly less awful. I bet a hell of a lot less people go hungry in France compared to the US.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Do you have any evidence to back that up or is it just a hunch? The US has a pretty solid safety net as well including unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, child and mother nutrition programs, Medicaid coverage, etc.

pron 11y ago

Which is why I think it is crucial that we all understand what it is that those party-poopers are actually saying, rather than respond to the whines we're hearing. The one core point of all of our liberal struggles -- whether "class warfare" as you call it or feminism -- isn't about being content, happy, alive etc.. It is about power[1] and its distribution. Absolute measures of wealth are very important, but so is the distribution of power. As long as the distribution of power is so grossly imbalanced, it means that few of us have a lot of control over the many, or, if you prefer, that the many aren't free[2]. If people learn only one thing about this class-warfare or feminism, it should be this. This unfair distribution of power is a problem at any scale: within the West, the West vs. the rest of the world etc.. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) [2]: The word free is a loaded one, and in the taxonomy of values it is an ill-defined one because it is self-contradictory, but I'm using it here very loosely.

VLM 11y ago

"We have an embarrassing wealth of food" Who's this "we"? 40% of school children have free/reduced lunch due to poverty.

marknutter 11y ago
Sorry, I should have given the proper context in my original post, but I mean we have an embarrassing wealth of food compared to past generations. Yes, it sucks that some children have less than others, but when compared to children from past generations they're doing much better.
fennecfoxen 11y ago
My mother will gladly relate to you how her family was never really poor growing up: the really poor kids came to school with Crisco sandwiches. There was no free or reduced-price school lunch.
jbob2000 11y ago
Right, but 100 years ago, those kids would just starve to death, rather than get state assistance.
- flubert 11y ago
  Anyone have statistics for number of starvation deaths in 1915 in the U.S.?

cryoshon 11y ago

To call America a democracy today is not accurate; the public's actions have no sway on policy relative to the sway that the moneyed elites hold. This phenomenon has been documented by a number of studies. Capitalist oligarchy is the correct term to refer to the system of government of the US. The public is disgruntled about the perceived change from democracy to this new despotic system. Class warfare against the rich is now a concept because most of the country lost the last round of class warfare around the time the economic depression started, in which the rich got far richer while everyone else got poorer. Whether this is a great struggle for rights or not is unclear, but based off of the last Gilded Age, it will be glossed over in the history books such that people do not understand that change can be effected under certain circumstances. We have a bevy of great causes, but for the most part, our empowerment to affect changes in service of those causes has been nullified. We are disenfranchised, and disgruntled. That we live in relative comfort is no relief; we feel excluded from the making of our own society, and it is a serious problem. This exclusion needs to change first before the other issues can be pursued. The last time there was such a disenfranchisement of public power in the US, a world war caused it to fall out of attention.

elipsey 11y ago

I don't want more money; I want more democracy. Treating our highly skewed wealth distribution strictly as a matter of material welfare is a diversion from the fact that extreme income inequality is evidence of regulatory capture and rent seeking. When war contractors and bankers whisper in the ear of the executive branch to lobby for legislation by executive order and extra judicial legal clarifications (as in the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales fiasco), massive anonymous campaign donations are upheld by the supreme court as "free speech", and so on, the wealthy have many times more political influence than you do. Recall the scandals surrounding massive, secret, quid pro quo political donations by the tycoons of the first Gilded Age; now the supreme court has found that when the rich buy an election they have a legal right to do it in secret. The problem is not that I want more money; it's that our votes are counted in dollars. This is how we ended up with a regressive tax system (20-30 percent for earned income, %15 for capital gains, %0 percent for offshore “wealth managed” assets), “Torte Reform”, “Bankruptcy Reform”, and plea bargaining, to keep you from having your day in court, privatized prisons, repeal of Glass-Steagall, and all sorts of other rules that structurally advantage people who control capital. The state arguably sponsors consumer indebtedness: the education, health care, and housing markets are all inflated by government money, and medical and student debts are exempt from bankruptcy. Low interest rates seem to create asset bubbles, and we socialize the losses by bailing out banks but not individuals. A good life means more than just “three meals a day” eaten in prison, on parole, or as an indentured servant. “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Anatole France